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Europa, which owns Licensing Option 16/2 outright, said both prospects are above the 200m barrel threshold it considers the minimum economic field size.

The company said together with the three Cretaceous fan prospects - Wilde, Beckett and Shaw - in its wholly-owned Frontier Exploration Licence 3/13, which adjoins 16/2, are collectively estimated to house more than two billion barrels of oil equivalent.

In total, Europa now estimate its unrisked resource across seven Irish Atlantic Margin licences amounts to a potential 4.7bn barrels of oil and 1.5 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Europa said the next step will involve reprocessing the existing 3D seismic data to derisk the 16/2 prospects to potentially upgrade them to “drillable status”.

Europa chief executive Hugh Mackay said, “This CPR for LO 16/2 has delivered audited Prospective Resources of 553m boe for two new pre-rift prospects Edgeworth and Ervine in the emerging pre-rift play in the South Porcupine Basin.

“Combined with our existing CPR for the Cretaceous fan prospects in FEL 3/13 this brings the sum of our mean audited Prospective Resources in the basin to over 2 billion boe.

“The potential resources on these two licences are very large and diversified in terms of play type.

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“We believe that Atlantic Ireland is about to enter a phase of exploration drilling starting this summer.

“Portfolio diversity should enable us to profit from the read across from other companies’ success, whichever play it comes from.

“Our target for future work on these prospects in LO 16/2 is to undertake a programme of 3D reprocessing to further de-risk the prospects and mature them to drillable prospect status.

“In parallel with this we have an active farm-out programme underway for our industry leading licence position offshore Atlantic Ireland which includes LO 16/2. This is an exciting time for Europa and I look forward to updating the market on our progress.”